1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to computer systems, and more specifically relates to filtering of search results.
2. Background Art
Search engines are commonly used to find information on the Internet. One problem that exists is the relatively large number of hits a search engine may retrieve. As a result, a user of a search engine typically sifts through the results by manually viewing the many pages of results page-by-page to locate the most relevant information in the search results. While the search engines return search results in a ranked order, from highest perceived relevance to lowest perceived relevance, the ranking methods are somewhat crude, and are based only on the search terms that were used.
One problem with the way search engines operate is they provide no user control during the search. They are typically implemented as a black box, meaning that the user puts in keywords to search, and the search engine returns the search results, which often can be lists of hundreds or thousands of hits. Another problem with known search engines is an unintuitive user interface that uses buttons, text boxes, and Boolean logic to construct complicated search syntax, which can be difficult to understand. In addition, known search engines provide no feedback to the user regarding how some change in the search terms might affect the output before the search is performed. Known search engines often provide too many results without any good way of filtering the search results. Without a way to easily filter search results under user control, the user will be stuck with manually reviewing each page of results to determine the relevance of each hit on each page.